Powering resilient procurement for a global energy company

Keeping deliveries on time and of high quality is a delicate balancing act when you work with more than 3,500 suppliers around the world. The company has an installed base of more than 7,000 turbines – a number that is growing to support the rapid global energy consumption. The uptime of these assets and on-time installation of new units requires a robust, resilient, reliable, and responsive procurement system – one that can handle thousands of daily purchase orders, improving the availability of the right parts at the right time and to the right location.

The client's direct procurement organization works closely with suppliers that provide critical parts across commodities like small mechanical, electrical, electronics, forging, and castings. Before COVID-19, a pivot toward increased contract manufacturing, lower-cost regions, and integrated global supply chains delivered promising results. But the supply chain upheaval during the pandemic disturbed the company's day-to-day operational equilibrium – all due to its dependency on external suppliers and reliance on cross-functional teams. The company faced:

• Missed customer deliveries due to supplier delays and promise slippages
• Cost escalations due to vendor negotiation delays and sudden price inflation requests
• Execution delays from cross-functional teams due to conflicting priorities
• Limited visibility on parts availability
• Increased outage cycle times

Clearly, the old way of doing things wasn't working. The company needed to change its direct procurement operations to give clear visibility to all its stakeholders and maintain high supplier performance. Because supply chain disruptions are now commonplace due to geopolitical dynamics, inflation, and other factors, the company leveled up its procurement operations to embrace disruptions.

Genpact's ongoing five-year partnership with the client across requests for quotes, purchase order (PO) management, supplier quality, supplier performance management, and accounts payable gave us a head start in identifying the procurement issues for the company.

Our solution? A lean approach. We built a daily management platform with its foundation in lean principles to provide clear visibility of every PO line and actionable insights to all stakeholders in the supply chain, driving better accountability. This web-based platform empowered all cross-functional teams – engineering, order management, sales, and procurement – with near-real-time data so they could collaborate and address problems together.

The platform shows buyers all the insights they need to prioritize their activities so they can win the day. It gives automated notifications on escalations and recommends actions just in time to help the team meet or exceed daily targets. Its advanced analytics-run dashboard also provides turnaround times for various activities and prompts proactive mitigation when an issue – such as a delayed part – is predicted.

Our partnership not only improved team efficiencies but also brought much more predictability to the supply chain by helping buyers make smarter supplier choices based on their performance scorecards.

This initiative is also key to the success of the company's goal to reduce outage cycle times by 22% and lays the foundation for AI and a future AWS/ServiceNow implementation.